January 13, 2015 On the Shelf Rimbaud Inspires Bank Robbery, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “You should get out there and rob a bank,” Rimbaud apparently urges his readers. Illustration by Paterne Berrichon, ca. 1890s. Inspired by Rimbaud—“who essentially believed a poet had to descend into the depths of all that was bad and report back”—an MIT visual arts and film professor held up a bank in Chinatown. “I stood outside the bank talking into the camera for quite a while … going over the different reasons to do it and not to do it.” In the mid-nineteenth century, on the other hand, women were scarcely allowed to visit the post office, which was “frequently made rendezvous for interdirected communication and illicit pleasures.” But today, in the age of big data, everyone is welcome in museums—especially if you bring your smartphone. “From the minute you enter the building—before, if you bought tickets online—you are also contributing personal information to the museum’s newly minted ‘engagement’ department. Don’t be surprised if, while you linger in front of a Caravaggio, a coupon for a cappuccino in the museum café pops up on your phone … When data mining turns a museum into a frequent-flier program, the result is commerce, not culture.” In 1966, a British magazine illustrator went on the set of 2001 and drew what he saw. “Kubrick [wanted] illustrated production stills of what happened on his set, rather than having a photographer take noisy and distracting photographs. The illustrations … would then be sent out in press kits to publications and other media outlets that could promote the film.” None of his images were published at the time, but now you can see them here. Don’t just judge a book by its cover—judge it by two. Compare U.S. and UK editions of last year’s books.
January 12, 2015 Look A Kind of Sleaze By Dan Piepenbring The New York Observer has an excellent new interview with Robert Crumb, whose response to the Charlie Hebdo attack appeared in Libération this weekend. Crumb has lived in France for a quarter of a century—in typical fashion, he was moved to respond not by any sort of ethical imperative but because he worried what people would say about him if he stayed quiet: “Where’s Crumb? Why doesn’t he come forward? What the hell’s the matter with him?” And, as he makes clear in the interview, his aim was not to be controversial, but personal: Libération called me and said, “Crumb, can you do a cartoon for us? About what you think about this, you know, you are a major cartoonist, and you live in France.” So I thought about it. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I’m doing the dishes, or whatever, I was thinking, “What should I do for that cartoon … ” I had a lot of ideas. Other people come up with these, you know, clever cartoons that comment on it, like … This one guy did a cartoon showing a bloody dead body laying there, and a radical Muslim standing over him with a Kalashnikov, saying, “He drew first!” Stuff like that. That’s good, that’s clever, you know, I like that. But, me? I gotta like, you know, when I do something, it has to be more personal. I said, first: “I don’t have the courage to make an insulting cartoon of Muhammed.” Then I thought, “OK, I’m the Cowardly Cartoonist … As a Cowardly Cartoonist, I can’t make some glib comment like that, you know? I have to, like, make fun of myself. So instead of drawing the face of Muhammed [laughs], I drew the ass of Muhammed. [Laughs.] But then I had myself saying, in small lettering, “Actually, this is the ass of my friend of Mohamid Bakshi, who’s a film director in Los Angeles, California.” So if they come at me, I’m gonna say, “No, look, it’s not Muhammed the Prophet, it’s this guy, Mohamid Bakshi.” So, you know. […] So, then Aline [Crumb’s wife] had this idea for another cartoon, which we also sent to Libération, a collaboration, that’s showing her looking at the drawing saying, “Oh, my God, they’re going to come after us! This is terrible … I want to live to see my grandchildren!” And then she has me saying, “Well, it’s not that bad. And, besides, they’ve killed enough cartoonists, maybe they’ve gotten it out of their system.” You can read the whole interview here. (Mohamid Bakshi, by the way, is a pointed reference to Ralph Bakshi, a director and animator with whom Crumb has feuded for some forty years over the rights to Crumb’s iconic Fritz the Cat character.) Crumb also gave the first interview in our Art of Comics series in 2010, in which he remarks on the reputation of cartoonists and comic-book artists, who in the not-so-distant past were not regarded as artists at all: Read More
January 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Simon Says By Sadie Stein Photo: Toy Whirl, via Flickr Not very long ago, family friends got in touch with me. Their son, Luke, was moving to New York for med school; it would be great if I’d see him and told him where to go in the city; he would be in touch. He was. “This is three hours of my life I’ll never get back,” I said bitterly to my boyfriend. “What’s wrong with him?” “Oh, nothing. He’s fine, from what I remember. He’s a perfectly nice guy. But, well, frankly … his parents carry on like he’s some kind of celebrated wit.” “How do they do that?” Read More
January 12, 2015 In Memoriam Robert Stone, 1937–2015 By Dan Piepenbring From our Winter 1985 issue: “A Robert Stone manuscript page, from his most recent novel, Children of Light; an indication of how barren the word processor has made examples of a work-in-progress.” “I like big novels,” Robert Stone said in his 1985 Art of Fiction interview. “I really admire the grand slam.” Stone died last weekend in Florida, at seventy-seven. He leaves behind more than a few grand slams—broad, despairing, powerful books full of searchers, outsiders, and misfits. His work exudes what Jessica Hagedorn calls “exquisite paranoia and apocalyptic dread.” Of course, descriptions like that can make his novels sound too potent—and one of the surprising things about Stone, it must be said, is how little he’s read these days. I hope that will change. As M. H. Miller wrote of him in 2013, He’s a best-selling author whose work has been heaped with critical praise, but because of the long interims between books, he is more heard of than read by a certain generation of readers. Updike had Rabbit, Roth had Zuckerman, Norman Mailer had Gary Gilmore, even Joan Didion, whose novels are the least interesting thing about her, had Maria Wyeth. Among Mr. Stone’s books there is no clear standout, no obvious introduction. His work is best taken in tandem, like one long narrative where you age with the characters. He’s right: among readers my age, Stone’s work has had that enviable air of mystery to it. He was always that major writer lurking in the distance. His books didn’t seem approachable, not because they were long or “difficult” but because, as the New York Times put it, they “resonate with philosophical concerns, the thin divides between life and death, good and evil, God and godlessness.” These were tomes about war and God and postwar tumult, and, uh, we definitely wanted to get to them, yes, but—maybe later? Read More
January 12, 2015 On the Shelf The Power of Suggestion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Daina Beth Solomon, via LA Weekly On Robin Robertson, who writes poems “that are truly, mesmerizingly carnal. I know women and men who have sought out online recordings just to hear him recite, in a low Scottish burr, his twelve-line ode to an artichoke. Whether Robertson is writing about sex, violence or the sea—three subjects he keeps coming back to—he remains a poet of the body, with a fondness for consonant-dense, guttural words that carry an almost physical presence on the page.” An LED sign in downtown Los Angeles was hacked in the name of literacy. Indie booksellers are reporting a noticeable uptick in sales. “In my judgment, there are between twenty and thirty editors and publishers in New York who—along with experienced and discriminating publicists, marketers, and sales reps—have over the decades regularly and successfully combined art and commerce and, in the process, have supported and promulgated art. They are in fact the main curators of our life of letters. They have somehow survived the grinding—tectonic—friction between creativity and business and made a go of both.” Joe Sacco on Charlie Hebdo: “Satire is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target? And why?” Have a look at the formidable geometry in these eighteenth-century forts, which represent “the classic century of military engineering.” “Engineers wanted to create overlapping planes of fire, so that defenders could cover every angle of approach from the walls of the forts.”
January 11, 2015 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Honoré Daumier, Advice to Subscribers, 1840. Michel Houellebecq defends his controversial new novel, Soumission. * How did the future look from the past? Jason Z. Resnikoff sees the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien. * In the early nineties, Paul Thomas Anderson found an inspirational teacher: David Foster Wallace. * Dan Piepenbring on the demise of R&B groups and the promise of D’Angelo’s new album, Black Messiah. * “Being interesting, at a very basic level, is sort of the point of telling a story in the first place.” Thomas Pierce talks to James Yeh. * Michael Thomson on The Evil Within, a horror video game that breaks all the rules. * Five new paintings by Mamma Andersson. * Ben Mauk visits Berlin‘s art book fair. * Plus, Sadie Stein on the history of okay; and a poem by the late Stanislaw Baranczak.